


World's End

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Lost
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 15:31:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16370279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: The DHARMA Initiative attempt to pick up the pieces after the Incident.





	World's End

He’d always known he had a bit of a reputation for spending a lot of time locked in his lab rather than socialising with the rest of his people. But right now, Pierre welcomes the chance to hide away in his lab rather than have to deal with the aftermath of the Incident.

He’d hated having to make that orientation video for the Swan station, to talk so matter-of-factly about how there had been an incident not long after the experiments began as though it had not affected him so personally. Everyone still talks about that group of people who’d disappeared with no explanation not long after the Incident, blaming them for what happened. No one knows that at night, Pierre still sometimes sits outside the house where Miles had lived, remembering. They’d lived on the same damn Barracks for three years with barely a word spoken, in fact Pierre hadn’t even known what Miles’s last name was that whole time. If he had known it was Straume, the same as Lara’s maiden name, and put it together with the fact that Lara was a fan of Miles Davis, could he ever have worked it out?

Maybe not, he thinks to himself. He hadn’t even believed it when Miles’s friend Daniel had come out and said it. Even though earlier that same day, he’d been talking about the possibility of time travel down at the Orchid, he hadn’t expected to be proved right quite so soon. It was only later, when Pierre had thought back to those strange comments that fat fool had made about whether or not he talked to his son about his work, that he’d wondered whether he’d been wrong to dismiss Daniel’s comments as the ramblings of a madman.

People around him are blaming Miles and his friends for what happened. But Pierre’s at fault too, for helping to come up with the idea of the Swan in the first place, for not managing to stop Stuart from carrying on with the drilling.

All he can do now is hold on to what memories he has. Reading between the lines, Pierre knew that he hadn’t been, or wasn’t going to be, playing an active role in his son’s life. They hadn’t had time to get to know each other as father and son. But Pierre still clings to the thought of how Miles had dragged him away from the machinery, how Miles had referred to him as Dad for the first time.

So he’ll hold on to the memories, as he knows it’s all he’ll have left for a while.

 

Amy’s gained a certain kind of fame among their people since the Incident, even though she and Ethan had been evacuated before it happened. She’s become known as The First Woman To Deliver A Baby To Term, she’s stared at everywhere she goes. Even the bunch of new recruits so hastily drafted in to replace those no longer with them all stared at her during processing.

No one had thought much of the first strange miscarriage. The woman, Nancy, had never been very strong anyway, so no one was surprised when she didn’t survive the complications. But it continued to happen; their doctor was baffled by it. Pierre had been drafted in to perform some experiments with rabbits and mice, and the same thing happened with them. They all died midway through their second trimester.

From his experiments with the animals, Pierre thinks he knows what the problem is. But if he’s right, there’s nothing that can be done. The damage was caused when his warnings were ignored and the electromagnetic energy was released.

They’ve caused the babies to begin time-travelling in and out of their mothers’ wombs.

This hasn’t been released to the community at large yet; Pierre hadn’t wanted to frighten anybody. But he’d had to tell Horace, who’s still their leader despite Radzinsky’s attempted coup, which had meant telling Amy, too. But people are talking; it’s only a matter of time before they realise.

Horace can’t handle what’s happening; he’s turned to the drink again. Pierre’s shut himself away in his lab, Lara never returned on the sub, Juliet disappeared in the Incident and Amy’s discouraged from even mentioning her name anyway, she’s not allowed to mourn her friend.

Sometimes, Amy wishes she’d never come back on the sub. There’s no one she can talk to any more.

 

Horace asks himself every day whether he could have done anything differently. Maybe if he’d gone along with Stu’s suggestion of shooting the Hostile? No, he thinks. Stu shut himself away in the Swan precisely because he feels guilty that his attempts to take over contributed to what happened.

Or maybe if he’d insisted LaFleur and his friends boarded the sub back in ‘74? Would that have made a difference? Again, he’s not sure. The chosen site for the Swan would still have been the same; someone was always going to drill into the pocket of energy.

Right now, Horace is even beginning to wish he’d left when Olivia did. Things would certainly be easier, away from this place. Roger Linus has been on Horace’s back already, going on about how he’d never wanted to be a workman and now that vacancies had come up, he’d like to be considered. “Show some respect, Roger,” Horace had snapped. “And get out of my sight.”

Officially, of course, Horace is still leader, but there are still some who have lost confidence in him after he’d hesitated to shoot the man he’d believed to be a Hostile, but now understands from Pierre that his far-fetched claim to be from the future had been true after all. Those who followed Stu had also lost their leader, following his decision to remain in the hatch pushing the button.

But in some ways, he finds it easier when he’s not expected to lead, when he’s in his lab working with equations. He’d come up with the equation that would keep the energy contained, in the hope that he’d never have to use it. Now, in an attempt to fix things, he’s continuing to look at other possible formulas, to see if there’s any other combination of numbers that will keep the energy contained, without any fear of the end of humanity. But whatever Horace tries, he keeps coming up with the same answer: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.

 

“You don’t have to do this,” Pierre had said. “We can bring other people in to do it. There’s no reason for you to remain down there pushing the button the whole time.”

“Yes, there is,” Radzinsky had replied, flinching as he looked at where Pierre’s arm should have been. “I caused this mess. Let me clean it up.”

The Swan had always been his pet project. Radzinsky had put a lot of time into building the model of the station. He hadn’t been able to bear the idea that his plans might not come to fruition because of some craziness by LaFleur’s physicist friend.

Now, as he stares at the concrete walls which have become his prison, Radzinsky wishes he’d listened to Pierre when he’d insisted on stopping drilling. He should have known Pierre wouldn’t have said that without a good reason. Now Radzinsky has blood on his hands; Phil, who was always loyal, had been killed in the Incident, LaFleur’s little clique of yahoos and those new recruits had all disappeared without trace, presumed dead too. And all of it could have been avoided if Radzinsky had just given in. The credit and glory associated with his station being such a success, the long-suppressed desire to take over from Horace as leader - it was Radzinsky’s own egomania that had led to the need for someone to be stationed down here entering numbers. And it was only fitting that it should be him.

It may not be the end of humanity, but it’s the end of the world as Radzinsky knows it.


End file.
